


Illumination

by akamarykate



Category: In the Forests of Serre - Patricia A. McKillip
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2007-12-19
Updated: 2007-12-19
Packaged: 2018-01-25 06:59:41
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 7,763
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/1637837
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/akamarykate/pseuds/akamarykate
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Wizards never do anything without a reason; Euan and Unciel during and after the events of the novel.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Illumination

**Author's Note:**

> Many thanks to Bruce Robertson; he doesn't know me from Eve, but his picture book, <i>Marguerite Makes a Book</i>, was the source of all kinds of helpful information about medieval manuscripts.
> 
> Written for Lferion

 

 

"Ask me," Unciel, the wizard who woke the magic in Dacia, said when they dined together. "If I can, I'll answer."

Too afraid to loose the question lodged in his chest, Euan Ash asked instead about the wonders Unciel had harnessed, and pretended the answers filled him. But the real question teased at the edges of Unciel's stories of witches and ghosts and legends come to life, until it was nearly a third person in the room.

One soft day in early summer, Euan sat scoring faint lines into dozens of blank vellum pages. The task sent him into a light trance, through there were no words on the pages to dream about. It would take all the vellum in the tall stack, and more, to trace the sum of Unciel's life. Why now, Euan wondered drowsily. Had Unciel come to the end of his adventures? How many lives did a wizard have?

And if this was the end, why had Unciel--

His hold on the rule slipped, and the stylus left a skittering indentation down a page. Heaving a sigh at his carelessness--Proctor Verel would have made him clean all the ink pots in the scriptorium--he rubbed his back and glanced out the window at a blank spot in the garden, a shady corner devoid of green. The rest of the yard fell in neat, ordered rows, valleys and hills no higher than his ankles just greening over, promising meals and potions. But that one spot lay empty, inexplicably brown.

Euan jumped, his elbow sweeping vellum to the chamber floor, when the wizard's hand landed on his shoulder.

"Ask me," Unciel said again, his voice a whisper of new shoots poking up from the earth. "Your curiosity is driving the cat to distraction."

Euan blinked down at the one-eyed cat. It twined its way around the desk legs and left muddy paw prints on the vellum. He swallowed twice, but still couldn't find the courage to ask the real question. "Why do you have that empty spot in the garden?" he asked instead. "What purpose does it serve?" Outside, the pea vines curled around stick poles, and bits of straw skittered over the bare corner of earth.

Unciel didn't answer, but his hand remained.

"Never mind," said Euan. "I'm sure you have a reason. Proctor Verel told me that wizards don't do anything without a reason."

"Maybe," Unciel said. He squeezed Euan's shoulder, then released it. "Nothing will grow there. Believe me, I've tried." He was almost through the doorway when the question pushed its way out of Euan's mouth.

"Why did you choose me?" he blurted out, so loud the cat jumped. "I'm not the cleverest scribe. I don't know half the languages the others do. I'm not the neatest, nor am I the quickest." He bit his tongue, horrified, but the words poured out of him the moment his teeth released the flesh. "I plod along and I spill ink and I'm forever scraping out my mistakes and half the time I forget to leave space for the illuminations, or I leave too much space, and--"

Unciel held up a hand, his eyes glittering--or twinkling? Euan couldn't tell--but to his everlasting relief, the words stopped. "And yet," the wizard said, "you are the one I chose." He slipped away, his soft footfalls lost in the endless hall.

Euan reached for the fallen vellum and the scroll the chest had coughed out that morning. He'd written two paragraphs about talking trees and houses that moved themselves before he realized that Unciel, who was once again tying up pea vines, hadn't answered his question.

*~*~*

A week after Princess Sidonie left for Serre, Euan sat dreaming with his eyes open. He swam in a blue-green sea, naiad hair and seaweed tangled around his wrists. A dragon below needed his help, but the naiads begged him to tarry with them. A silver blue fish darted past him, down into the deep water. No, it was--

The raven cawed.

Starting awake, Euan followed the brush of the raven's wing on his face and saw that Unciel had fallen in the garden. Euan jumped to the window, sending his pen and a half-pot of ink rolling across the floor.

The wizard's crumpled form lay between rows of radishes and arugula, his brown robes almost indistinguishable from the dirt. Euan clambered onto the window seat and out, catching a foot on the casement and tumbling into a sumac bush. He rolled, jumped up, and ran to Unciel, who had already pushed himself onto his knees. His breath came in sharp gasps; his fingers were half in the dirt, as if he'd tried to plant himself. "It's nothing," he said as Euan knelt next to him. "My shovel hit a stone."

"How could that--?" Euan began, then thought the better of it. He himself had tripped over dropped quills in the scriptorium.

Using the shovel and Euan's shoulder, Unciel stood. A grunt escaped, and he smiled ruefully. "Old bones and new plants aren't always a good combination." He poked the shovel at the ground, but Euan moved the blade aside.

"Let me," he said, scrabbling at the dirt for the offending rock. His fingers scraped something hard and ridged, and he redoubled his efforts, but what he extracted was a shell, a scallop larger than his hand, glowing iridescent pearl on the inside and smelling of salt water and seaweed.

"Ah," said Unciel. The shovel sent up a puff of dirt as he let it drop so he could cup the shell in his hands. He peered into it, turned his ear to it to listen, then raised his eyebrows. "You've reached the sea dragon's story."

Perplexed, Euan nodded. "The naiads were trying to trap you in the kelp. But we're leagues away from the sea. How did the shell end up in your garden?"

Unciel shrugged, and the creases around his eyes deepened. "Bits of the stories follow and grow, no matter how much I might want them to stay buried. Most likely I didn't get all the sand off my boots." He handed the shell back to Euan with an indecipherable expression. "It might be useful later." He reached for the shovel.

Euan ducked under his arm and grabbed the shovel from the dirt. "What needs doing?" he asked, afraid the wizard would send him back to his desk, back underwater, away from the sunshine and green.

"Time to turn over the arugula and plant beans," Unciel said. He dusted shaking hands on his gardening apron.

"I'll do it." Before Unciel could protest, Euan started turning over shovelfuls of earth and spindly shoots going to seed. He worked his way down the row with determination. He wasn't going to let a great wizard--the greatest wizard of his time--weaken himself over a row of lettuce.

"That's enough--you're into the dandelions," Unciel said, and Euan blinked in surprise. The green leaves didn't look that different to him than those he'd overturned. "Look." Unciel pointed back down the row. A line of scallops, ranging from the size of Euan's thumb up to the first, and largest, was mixed in with the ruins of the arugula. "They're up to something."

Unciel started gathering shells, shaking out the dirt. "I'll do it," Euan said again. Sweat trickled down his back as he stacked the shells. He tried to give them to Unciel, who shook his head.

"I think they're meant for you. Perhaps a sign that you should go back and finish the story," he added gently.

Euan rubbed his thumb over his brow. Gritty dirt scraped across his skin. "You should rest," he said. He was afraid that if he lost himself in the story, he would miss a graver fall, a more permanent injury.

"I am well." Unciel averted his cloudy eyes from Euan's gaze. "The garden takes care of me. Of us," he added more thoughtfully, brushing a smudge of dirt off Euan's sleeve.

"I can do hard work," Euan insisted. "Just because I sit at a desk all day doesn't mean I have to."

"No, it doesn't," Unciel said, "but that is the work I've hired you to do. Go, and take the shells." He lowered himself to his knees, wincing, and took a trowel and a small cloth-wrapped bundle from one of his apron pockets.

Euan stepped over the row and knelt across from Unciel. He pulled a medium-sized scallop from the stack of shells. "Maybe this is what they're meant for," he said, and used it to dig a small hole. Unciel stared at him, then at the hole, before taking three speckled seeds from the cloth and dropping them in the hole.

"It's a long row," he said, his brow furrowed as he watched Euan cover the seeds, "and I'm a slow old man. The sun will be setting by the time we're done."

"I can write by candlelight." Euan scooted down the row to start the next hole. The sharp, peppery smell of the overturned arugula wafted up to his nose, mingling with the sea salt scent of the shells. Unciel watched him for a brief moment, then shrugged and took out more seeds.

*~*~*

Blinking awake from a forest of stones, Euan dabbed his pen in the nearly-empty container of ink. It was a hot day in high summer. A spare, blessed breeze teased the back of his neck. "The tallest stone shifted and became," he translated, then frowned over the next scribbled word in Unciel's hand--was it "water" or "warriors"? "Warriors" made the most sense, but Euan was learning that Unciel's tales didn't follow the same rules of logic that worked in the king's scriptorium, and every word was important to a wizard.

He took the scroll to the window, but direct sunlight didn't help decipher the word, nor did it draw the lingering breeze into the room. Out in the garden, Unciel picked several bright orange blossoms from one of the vines and dropped them into the basket at his feet. Euan never quite knew what supper would be these days, even when he'd helped to grow and gather it himself.

Ever since Unciel had fallen, Euan had been making excuses to go out to the garden, especially when the tasks at hand were strenuous--staking the climbing beans, digging turnips, pulling the ivy that wanted to spring up everywhere. These days there was just as much dirt as ink under his fingernails. To his surprise, he enjoyed the work, even though he understood the garden little better than he understood its wizard. Unciel always protested that he'd hired Euan to take care of his stories, not his produce, but Euan would shrug and say that his eyes, his fingers, or his backside needed a change. They had fallen into a rhythm of working together for an hour or two, in between tales and seedlings.

The shady corner of the garden lay bare, still resisting all the seeds and shoots Unciel tried to coax into growing there. This simple failure fascinated Euan. Unciel was a wizard, after all; however drained he might be, he could surely use his power to coax a vegetable or herb from the recalcitrant ground. But he seemed to thrive on the frustration of battling the bare spot in a purely human way.

Euan stood to go out to the garden--through the back door, this time. But as he went to the door, his gaze landed on the stack of scallop shells and the empty reservoir of ink, and an idea, spontaneous and undeniable as ivy, curled through his brain.

After a word to Unciel and a hot walk to the market square, he stumbled over a cobblestone and into the apothecary, a haven of cool dim light in the heart of summer. The old man who ran the shop blinked at Euan from behind his counter.

"I need gall nuts," Euan said, stalling while he tried to remember what he'd need for colored ink. The gall nuts, ground and mixed with a binder, would make writing ink. But the stories wanted more: blue for the ocean; red and yellow and green for the dragon; gold for the naiad's hair.

"Don't tell me you spilled all the wizard's ink."

Euan turned at the lilting voice. A young woman in a bright red scarf stood in the doorway.

"Caille." She was one of the illuminators; she worked in the scriptorium when she wasn't busy with a commission from the king or another official. Her illustrations, layered in color and gold, enclosed and expanded every story, every birth scroll and death tribute to which she set her brush. Like all scribes, Euan had learned to create initials and borders, but he had been frustrated by his inability to bring the images he saw when he closed his eyes onto the page. "What are you doing here?"

She arched an eyebrow. "The same as you, I expect. Buying supplies for a commission. The king's asked me to make Princess Sidonie's wedding decree."

"But she's--" Euan swallowed back all he knew, all the hints of something gone wrong, or at least gone not-quite-right, in Serre. "She's not married yet."

"She will be by the time I'm finished." Caille moved to a basket of yellow flowers and began sorting through them. "The king wants it done as soon as possible."

The king, Euan thought, wanted to tell Sidonie's tale as he wished it to be, not as it was unfolding. But he didn't say that to Caille. For all he knew, her paintings created the stories, not the other way around. "Congratulations," he said instead.

"I'm thinking roses, for love," she said as she fingered a bunch of dried purple blooms hanging from the shop's rafters. "And violets for faithfulness."

"And a hive in the corner," Euan said, thinking of the princess's honey colored hair, and how the bees had swarmed around it.

Caille laughed and tucked a strand of hair back under her scarf. "You always have the oddest ideas."

The shop owner emerged from the back room with a basket full of hard, rattling gall nuts. "How many?"

Euan wasn't sure. "Enough for several months of writing," he said. There was at least that much work left in Unciel's chest of scribblings. He drew up his courage and turned back to Caille. "I can barely sketch a tree, but I can do initials, and I thought--as a gift to Unciel, because he's paid me very well, I'm going to try illuminating some of the pages."

"Ah." She nodded, but confusion drew a line across the bridge of her nose.

Euan traded the shopkeeper a coin for a cloth bag full of gall nuts while Caille piled roots and flowers onto the counter. "I don't understand him," Euan blurted out, "but--"

Her frown eased; her eyes lit. "But you want to."

He nodded, then retreated to safer ground. "I know I need saffron for the yellow, and lapis for the blue, but red--"

"Madder's best," she said, lifting a gnarled root from the counter. He turned to look for more in the baskets lining the back wall, but Caille put a hand on his arm. "You don't need very much." She added a tumble of lapis stones to her pile. "The king's treasurer gave me gold coins to buy all new supplies for the decree. I already have the most beautiful piece of vellum--eight handspans wide, without a single hole or tear. And as for the dyestuffs, it only takes a small amount to do initials and borders."

"Easy for you to say." Euan rattled his gall nuts to remind her of his spills. "When do you ever make mistakes?"

"All the time. As Proctor Verel says, it's not the number of mistakes that measures craftsmanship; it's whether or not you correct them."

Euan snorted. Proctor Verel had never said any such thing to him.

"Anyway, if you'd like, you can have some of the odds and ends I have in my studio."

"I can't take the king's supplies. That would be--"

"Payment, for looking after his wizard. Trust me, I've more than enough." Caille bumped Euan's elbow and grinned.

Euan followed her to her studio, a tiny cottage that was more windows than walls, connected by climbing vines--the same ivy, Euan realized, that he'd spent hot hours pulling from Unciel's garden. It crept over the windowsills, giving the sunlight that flooded the room a greenish cast. He marveled over Caille's charcoal sketches, wisps of flowers and mountains and Dacia's history, including one of a young wizard, hand raised in a spell, face blurry.

"That's your Unciel." Caille had come up behind him. She tilted her head to one side, then back. "I've been working on a history of magic in Dacia. I can't quite get him right."

"I can tell it's him." There was something about the way the figure held its hand aloft--commanding, but not imperious, a bit of humility in the hunch of his shoulders balancing the confidence in the lift of his chin. That pose couldn't have come from anyone but Unciel. And yet, though he didn't dare agree with Caille out loud, she was right. While it _was_ Unciel, it wasn't _all_ of him.

"There's something missing, though. Something essential to him that I can't get down, no matter how many times I've read the story of how he brought magic to Dacia."

She gave Euan a basket loaded with roots and flowers and misshapen gems, and a generous packet of gold leaf. "This ought to bring your pages to life. I added in some brushes, because I know you, you'll get your paints all mixed and then realize you have nothing but fingers and sticks to apply them. Oh, and you'll need shells for mixing--"

"I have those," Euan told her. "They gave me the idea in the first place." He waved a hand at her work. "I'll never be able to do anything like this. I just hope I can make a border that's half as good as yours."

"You'll make your own. That's why he hired you." Caille's smile was tinged with seriousness. "Have some faith in yourself, Euan Ash."

That night, he dreamed of golden naiads and sunset-orange dragons, tangled with drooping kelp in an ocean so blue that the morning sky, when it came, seemed as pale and dull as the water in which he washed. He turned his attention to a new story, leaving Caille's basket untouched. The thought of failing his dreams with a pale imitation was unbearable, and making any effort at all was difficult in a stifling summer morning drooping with humidity.

"How can you stand it?" he asked Unciel when they dined at midday.

The wizard blinked up from his steamed peas and ginger. Amusement played through the wrinkles around his mouth. "At the moment, I appear to be sitting it, whatever it may be."

Euan, single minded, waved his knife toward the hallway and the room where he worked. "All those stories--they aren't just stories to you. You lived every one of those adventures, you risked your own life, and others', and now--now there's just this." His waved the knife again, this time indicating the simple kitchen, the garden out the back door, and himself.

"And there is Serre," Unciel said. He frowned at the half-eaten biscuit he held, as if it could give him news of Princess Sidonie and Gyre, the errant wizard.

Euan put down his knife and his questions; the one he'd asked out loud, and the one the wizard had never really answered. "I can help with Serre," he offered. "Like I have with the garden."

"The garden, and now Serre? My adventures can't be all that compelling if you're so willing to abandon them."

"No, I don't mean--it isn't that," Euan stammered. "It's just--the stories will always be there, but if there's work to be done now, work that can't wait, I want to help."

Unciel regarded him, his shadowed eyes fathomless. Then, he nodded. "There may come a time when you can help in the matter of Serre. For now, the chervil needs taming."

Euan flexed his fingers. "It's a hot day," he said. "I'll bring out the water jug."

*~*~*

Weeks went by, and Euan forgot the basket of pigments. The lack of news from Serre, and then the finding of it, and the toll it all took on Unciel became more important than any stories to which he might have turned his attention.

As Unciel recovered, Euan spent most of his time in the wizard's room, recording the stories Unciel had never bothered--or never intended--to write down.

Gyre shadowed the halls and rooms of Unciel's cottage for days. He radiated authority and ease when he spoke directly to Euan and Tassel, but, like an aggressive weed, he was a presence to be tolerated, not trusted, no matter what faith Unciel might have in him. When Euan pretended to sleep or performed simple household tasks, Gyre sat with Unciel. As far as Euan could tell, they were silent, but he knew that meant little. If Unciel could communicate his needs to Euan with wordless thoughts, he must be able to have whole conversations with another wizard.

About what, Euan wasn't sure he wanted to know.

The more Euan tried to untangle the story of what had happened in Serre, the less he saw the point of Gyre at all. The thing that Unciel had killed, the shape Gyre had taken, had to be banished once and for all, and Serre had been the only place to do it. But Euan couldn't help but think that sending Gyre hadn't been the best choice for Sidonie, considering all she'd had to endure. And yet, if Gyre was to be believed, she truly loved Prince Ronan. Could that have come about without the witch and the monster?

As for Unciel, his choice had nearly killed him. It might still, if he could not recover his strength. Through the long hours between Unciel's waking periods, Euan tried to calculate the costs and profits of the wizard's choices, but he lost the thread of logic in the tale. This struck him as odd; aside from the scrawl that was Unciel's handwriting, the tales in the trunk all followed a certain neat logic. Unciel made strange choices in some of his adventures, but they always worked out for the best for all concerned. Every element in the tales served some end, even the monsters. But Gyre seemed neither changed nor repentant about his role. He helped with the chores, cleaning dishes with a flick of his fingers, but he remained a puzzle, and spoke to the raven more than he spoke to Euan or Lady Tassel.

One evening, when one of Unciel's unspoken desires sent Euan out to the garden to get lemon balm and turnips, he glanced at the bare corner and found it no longer bare. The ivy he'd been pulling all summer had claimed it while he was preoccupied with Unciel, its leaves grown bigger than Euan's hands. It had flowered as well; white blooms glowed in the gibbous moonlight.

He reached out to pick one, and it curled away from him, evading the heat of his hand. "Fine, then," he said crossly, and thought about pulling the ivy out by its roots, flowers and all. Crouching down, he reached for the base of the vines. But then he remembered what Unciel had said the day the shells had turned up, about the past not staying buried.

Curious, he thought as he sat back on his heels, that the ivy had chosen this corner and this time to bloom. He let the ivy be. He told himself it was because it was good that something, even a weed, had finally made a home of the forlorn spot.

Two days later, Gyre left with only a handful of words to Unciel, none at all to Euan, and a curt nod at Tassel as he vanished from the garden. Euan was left staring at a whirl of gold-tinged leaves settling to the ground.

"Well," Tassel said, "that's that." She picked up her basket of beans and went inside, Euan at her heels.

"Unciel needs help," Euan said with a swift glance out the back door, where the wizard was dozing on a chair Euan had carried out for him. "It isn't right. He saved Gyre, again, and it's left him weak. How can Gyre just go?"

Tassel gave a little "hmfph" and settled herself at the table. "That's the way of wizards," she said as she began splitting bean pods. She spilled the seeds into a bronze bowl covered in runes. "They're rootless. You can see it in their eyes. Like magpies, always thinking of the next bright adventure. Maybe Gyre heard a call, someone who needed his help. Or maybe he smelled trouble. Or treasure. But I've never known a wizard to stay in one place for long."

Euan gulped. "Never?" He turned to stack the cabbages he'd cut earlier that day. There were enough to feed the whole scriptorium.

Tassel's gaze followed the one-eyed cat as it ambled out to the garden. "Not until now."

"No one starts a garden like this and then leaves it," Euan said fiercely.

"No wizard puts down roots so deep he can't pull them up and go when the whim takes him," she retorted. "You're good for him, but I'm not so sure the reverse is true."

"What good can I do him?" asked Euan, thumping a cabbage onto his pile. Several others rolled out from under it. "I'm only a scribe."

"Better to ask what good you've already done," Tassel said, with that same note of warning. Then she relaxed and smiled at her lapful of bean pods. "If that one chose you, he had some purpose in mind. Wizards--"

"--don't do anything without a reason," Euan finished. "So I've heard."

Tassel nodded. "Just don't expect to understand those reasons. That's a chase after a firebird if ever I heard of one."

*~*~*

Fall came down in a flurry of blazing leaves and withered vines. Unciel sat in his chair in the ever-fainter sunlight and directed the harvesting of the last of the squash and peppers and herbs, telling Euan what to pull up, what to cut down, and what to dig under. The work was endless--until it ended, and the wizard's backyard was a muddy canvas waiting for spring.

Euan emerged from the work a little less scrawny, a little less nearsighted. He took up his pen again, trying not to notice that the jumble of papers to be translated from the wizard's hand was diminishing.

Unciel showed no sign of sending him away, but he didn't need Euan as much as he had in those first days after Gyre's return and departure. His eyes cleared, from the cloudy almost-blue they'd been when Euan first met him to the serenity of an autumn sky. The lines on his face softened and eased, and he was able to stand for longer periods of time, stewing his vegetables and herbs into concoctions that he mostly gave away.

Euan's work was rarely interrupted by Unciel's silent calls for mushrooms or cabbage soup now, though he could now feel tugs of recognition from Unciel when he stumbled upon new creatures and countries in the stories he transcribed. He found himself reaching for that connection, even when a story pulled him into dreams. Though Unciel's stories harrowed Euan, his presence in them reassured him. When he woke, it was often to the echo of Tassel's cautions, and the question of how he would ever resume a life without that companionship, ephemeral as it was.

One afternoon, as he watched blood-red leaves fall from the sumac bush, Euan remembered the pigments and shells. He dug them out from under a pile of translated pages, then mixed saffron, madder, and lapis with egg whites in the scallop shells, one shell for each color. Working freehand, he made a header for the story of the water dragon, bright flames on blue waves. He was courting disaster, he knew, but then again, if he had to rewrite the story, it would be another few days working for Unciel.

The colors of his simple header leapt off the page, but something was missing. Euan couldn't bring himself to draw the naiad, the wizard, or the dragon. He knew better than to try to bring dreams like those to life, not without skill and training like Caille's. So he told himself, until he woke from a light doze and found a burnt-charcoal stick next to his elbow.

There was some part of his mind that knew not to think too much, to close itself off and let his hand move along the page without looking at what it was doing. Instead, he read the words again, the story of the lair under the tangle of seaweed and the magic Unciel had restored to the ocean, and when he reached the end, it was all sketched on the page--the dragon trapped by its own selfish heart, the wizard reaching out to it through the churning water, and the naiads, their hair and fingers tangling into kelp along the borders of the page. They were small, just enough to fill the margins of the vellum pages, but they matched exactly what Euan had dreamed, the first time and every time he'd read the story.

He sat back, thirsty. Instead of his cup, he reached for his shells and brushes. He mixed and colored and shaded until the page was alive and the daylight was nearly gone. It wasn't as good as Caille's work--it was straightforward, simply the story he knew well. But it was far better than anything Euan had been able to create in his apprenticeship.

Rubbing the back of his neck, he stood, meaning to go for tea, when a shadow moved behind him.

"How long have you been here?" he asked it, and Unciel stepped into the last slant of sunlight, peering at the page drying on Euan's desk.

Unciel traced the curve of the naiad's hair down the margin, his finger hovering a nail's width above the drying ink. "I didn't know . . ." He trailed off.

"Neither did I," Euan admitted. "They hardly ever gave me a brush at the scriptorium. It's your story; it inspired me. I could see the whole thing--what?" he asked, because Unciel shook his head.

"I didn't know the dragon had those scallops on its back. Oh, I suppose I did know it, then, but I didn't _notice_. Just like I failed to notice that the dragon had the same eyes and nose as the naiads."

"I'm sorry," Euan said, "I didn't mean to take liberties. I just--I drew what I saw when I copied the story. I'll change it."

One corner of Unciel's mouth quirked up. "Why would you do that?"

"Because it's not right. It's not true."

"It is true." Unciel pulled his hand away with a nod. "The dragon did have scales. They were big as dinner plates, and they fell off, one by one, as we swam for the surface. I didn't notice until you showed me."

A thrill of recognition and fear ran through Euan. He'd seen that, in his dreams. But that meant the dream wasn't his own. "It's not--the people--I mean you--and the creatures aren't very good," he stammered. "They don't look real."

"They do if you squint."

Euan squinted, and the dragon and naiad seemed to swim across the page. He took an step back. Unciel chuckled, and Euan joined in nervously. "That's my talent," he said. "Better when not seen clearly."

Unciel's laughter faded, and his brow creased.

"I'm sorry," Euan repeated. "I'll write it over again, just the text. You won't have to pay me. I thought--"

Unciel held up a hand. "You've done nothing wrong. You see more in my words than I meant to put there." He rested his hand on Euan's arm. The figures on the page were fading into the deepening twilight.

"Yes, that's it, it's the words. Your words woke dreams in me, and after everything Gyre did to you, I wanted to--" Euan faltered, horrified at the shadow that crossed Unciel's face, and admitted, "There aren't that many stories left, and I didn't want to come to the end. But I'll stop."

"Will you stop dreaming?"

"I don't know how I can." He didn't _want_ to stop dreaming with Unciel's words, to go back to a life without that connection, but he didn't dare say that to a rootless, restless wizard.

Unciel squeezed, then released, Euan's arm. He leaned back against a bookcase, arms folded, and for a moment Euan saw the easy grace Unciel must have had in his youth, before the weight of his adventures and all the words he knew had stolen it, bit by bit. "That's the answer to your question, you know."

"What?"

"You asked me why I chose you. I didn't answer, and you didn't ask again, but you never stopped wondering." Unciel pointed at the candle on Euan's desk and it flared to life, frightening the cat onto the floor. Peering at Euan in the new light, he asked, "Were you afraid of the answer?"

Of course he was. The answer terrified him. "I--I thought--" He stared down at his shoes, which bore the scuffs and stains of garden work. Might as well say it, he decided. Now that he'd been caught stalling, he had little to hide--there was little he _could_ hide--from Unciel. "I thought that you must have picked me because you wanted someone who would be easy to send back, when the time came."

"It was because you were dreaming. The poem you were transcribing was only a handful of words, and a rather awkward handful at that, but when you fell asleep they woke inside you." Unciel tilted his head to one side, a smile playing around his eyes. "Bees, stones, and birds, wasn't it?"

Euan nodded, struck mute by the knowledge that even then, Unciel had seen into him so easily.

Unciel tapped Euan's desk as he moved to the door. "Don't stop illuminating. Not every story, of course. Some shouldn't be seen--" He broke off, staring past the candle at the darkest corner of the room. When his gaze came back to Euan, though, it was kind. "You choose the stories. I would quite like to see what you dream when you read my words."

*~*~*

All through the winter, Euan dreamed and wrote and painted. His fingers--and now and then the cat's paws--bore stains of crimson and azure and green, along with black. His robe was splashed with color as well. Eating a spoonful of stew, he would catch a flash of summer green, look up, expecting to see the garden in full bloom--one never knew with a wizard, after all--and realize it was his sleeve.

Unciel grew ever stronger, and spent his days at the castle, or visiting those who called for him, and a few that didn't. He returned for evening meals, which were often interrupted when he remembered another tale that he hadn't ever recorded. Late into the night, they would sit by the fire, their chairs pulled close while Euan took down the new stories. The crackling fire, the purring cat, the scratching pen, and, above all, Unciel's calm, steady voice, spun a cocoon of warmth that kept the harsh winter storms at bay.

All too soon, the days lengthened, and the light lingered into their evenings together. Unciel's store of tales ran low. He spent more and more time staring out the window at the garden plot or sorting the seeds he'd saved. Every once in a while, he would plunge his hand into a jar, and beans or peas would stream through his fingers, but he didn't plant them, not even when the ground was covered with dew instead of frost in the mornings. And then he took to looking at maps in the evenings, studying them as if he didn't know every inch of Dacia, Serre, and all the lands that surrounded them. Euan's heart skipped beats, but he didn't speak his fear. That might make it real.

The number of rooms in Unciel's house seemed to shrink. The raven took to the garden and built a nest in the apple tree, and the cat went out mousing. When the tree burst into blossom and Unciel still did not put seeds into the ground, Euan could no longer deny the truth. And then, one night, it slapped him in the face.

"There is an ogre in Porthal," Unciel said as he plopped a dish of last year's potatoes on the table. "They've asked me to come."

Euan nodded. All through the winter, the store of pigments Caille had given him had never even diminished, but now he was almost out of saffron and lapis, and even the gall nuts were low. He could count the sheets of vellum left on one hand. "I know," he said.

Unciel eased himself into his chair, one eyebrow lifted. "You don't seem surprised."

"Tassel told me, back when Gyre left." Euan stabbed a potato with his fork, then let it drop. "She said that it's the way of wizards, not to stay planted in one place or with one person for long. I believe she compared you lot to magpies." He tried to laugh, but choked on it, and looked up to find Unciel watching him intently, a strange swirl of green coursing through his blue gaze. His eyes weren't alien, like a bird's; they were too familiar, and too. . .too _full_. Full of experiences and knowledge that Euan could only share in dreams.

"It's been wonderful, truly," he went on, before Unciel could speak and shatter what was left of his composure. "The stories in that trunk--in you--it's been a privilege." He reached out his hand, then pulled it back when Unciel snorted.

"Tassel," he said, "doesn't know everything of the ways of wizards."

~*~*~*~*~*~

As soon as he stepped back into the scriptorium, Euan felt it--the stifling, suffocating closeness of the walls, despite the sun streaming through high windows and skylights. The scratches of dozens of pens were like bindings, tying the black-robed scribes to their desks. The one spot of color was Caille's red scarf. She sat at a desk near the windows, frowning hard at her pen.

One by one, the scribes noticed Euan, and their pens stopped. Finally, Proctor Verel looked up from the tome on his desk. "Scribe Ash!" he called, hefting himself from his stool. "Your desk has been empty for many months."

"Almost a year now," Euan said. He held out the bundle that weighed his arms down, a stack of vellum pressed between wooden boards and wrapped carefully in leather. "Unciel wanted these brought here. You should have them bound. They're worth more than--" He fumbled for the right words, but couldn't find them under the weight of all the words he carried. The stories he was giving away to King Arnou and the library of Dacia, the dreams that had come out of his pen and brush--those words could prove their own worth. They didn't need Euan to speak their value.

The other scribes gathered around as Verel loosed the leather ties. "Euan, these are wonderful," someone gasped, and he looked up to see Caille smiling at him with amazement.

"It's nothing compared to what you do," he said, the old shyness coming over him in a wave.

Caille rolled her eyes and grinned. "No, they're not mine. They're yours, and they're just right. They're so alive."

"If you squint," Euan added dryly.

"And there's your wizard." Caille had turned to the story of the water dragon. "You captured him exactly."

Several of the other scribes giggled. "Caille, do you really know that wizard?"

"I don't. But Euan does, and that's the point."

"It's good work," Verel said. "Very straight lines, neat lettering. Hardly any of your usual blots. If you keep this up, you might make proctor one day."

Another twitter of laughter ran through the scribes, and Euan blushed. "Someday, maybe."

"Come see what Caille's done," one of the girls said, tugging on Euan's hand with her own inkstained fingers. She pulled Euan to the window, where Sidonie's story had unfurled on a huge piece of vellum. It was beautiful--the honey-haired princess and the tall, handsome prince with a firebird over his shoulder, the words in green and gold proclaiming their marriage. Down one side of the decree, bits and pieces of Dacia told Sidonie's past. On the other, behind Prince Ronan, the witch Brume and her chickens gathered next to a waterfall that cascaded down the edge of the page.

Once, Euan had dreamed himself into that story, but the only way Caille could show his part, if she'd even known it, would be with a pot of cabbage stew. Not even the wizards could be found in the swirls of gold and red and blue and even purple that dazzled history into legend.

When he squinted, he saw a blur of gold and color, but none of the figures moved.

"It's beautiful," he told Caille. "Truly. King Arnou will be so pleased."

The other scribes drifted back to their desks. Caille nudged Euan with her elbow and pointed to the tiny golden beehive just under King Arnou's castle.

"I didn't forget," she said. "I didn't understand, but I didn't forget."

"She'll never be real in Dacia again, will she?" Euan asked. "The princess. All we have left of her is a dream, and her story." Judging by the tales he'd heard in the market, it wasn't a story that had much to do with what had really happened.

Caille nodded. "The best parts," she said, unconcerned with the differences between fact and story that were niggling at Euan. She glanced at the front of the room, where Verel was measuring careful lines on a new page. "You aren't really going to stay and be a proctor, are you?"

Euan hadn't been sure, until that moment, that he had come to say good-bye to his old life, and not to resume it. He knew now; he would suffocate in this closed book of a room. He shook his head.

"What's next in your tale?"

He rubbed the sound of scratching pens off the back of his neck. "I'm not entirely sure."

"It's hard to tell a story with no ending," said Caille. "How will we ever catch you on our pages?"

"I'll write to you," he said, "when I know the ending myself."

*~*~*

When he returned to the cottage, Unciel was in the garden, tying up volunteer pea vines sprung from seeds that had fallen the summer before. The garden seemed determined to go on, even if no one would be there to tend it. Ivy was already curling up the fence in its shady corner.

"Tassel makes a wonderful soup of the butter peas," Unciel said. "I've told her to take all she wants." Euan nodded mutely, swallowing against the lump in his throat.

"How were things in the scriptorium?" Unciel asked. He straightened, taller now than he had been a year ago, and dusted his hands.

"The same," Euan said. It was he who had changed, after all. "They were happy to take your records. They'll be well cared for."

Eyes twinkling, Unciel headed for the cottage. "I hope they'll be _read_."

"That, too."

"You have a great deal to do with that, Euan. My stories will be read--and seen--because of you."

Back inside the cottage, where no bread was rising, no vegetables stewing, Unciel turned to Euan and asked, "Ready?"

Euan nodded, trying to pretend he was sure. He loved Unciel, but, as he'd told the king last summer, he didn't understand him, even though he knew all the stories Unciel was willing to tell. And he still didn't know why Unciel had chosen him, not really. Those stories would surely wake dreams in any reader.

Unciel sighed. "I will say this one last time. I do want you to come with me. Or do you give more weight to Tassel's words than you do to mine?"

"Of course not," Euan said. "I just--I wish I knew why." He picked up their packs and tried to strap them both to his back at once.

"It was your heart," Unciel said.

Euan froze and looked up at Unciel, whose blue eyes sparkled like the ocean must.

"You have a good heart, a strong heart. That's why you dream. That's why I chose you."

Euan dropped the packs, shaking his head. That the wizard could see his dreams, he didn't doubt. They were, after all, Unciel's own stories. But his heart was as much a mystery to Euan himself as Unciel's power.

"My heart," he said, "isn't a stone or an egg. It hasn't been sickened or burned or tossed as ashes over a waterfall. It is only a heart, and barely that. It is--if anything--inkstained."

"I've seen a great many hearts. I've even held a few, as you know. Yours is full of tales and dreams--history and hope. Wizards need those once in a while. We become what we pursue, and we forget. I'm hoping you'll remind me, when I need it."

"But all my dreams belong to other people. Those dragons and naiads--they're your adventures, not mine."

"Then it's time you had a few of your own. I highly recommend it." Unciel flashed an entirely youthful grin as he nudged Euan off his pack and lifted it himself. "Think of the colors you'll dream then."

"Someday this will all be a story," Euan said as Unciel closed the cottage door gently, as if it were the cover of a treasured book. "Some other scribe might write it down, and leave out all the important parts, and then it will gather dust in the library."

"Someday," Unciel said. He gave Euan's shoulder a pat as they started down the uneven cobbled street together. "Someday, perhaps. But not today."

 

 

 


End file.
